Pictorial Space throughout Art History: Cézanne and ... - ARAS

ARAS Connections Issue 2, 2012
Van Gogh and Cézanne, who were contemporaries, illustrate these issues.
Both were passionate men with fiery artistic temperaments. Cézanne was
obsessed all his life with making his paintings “solid like the art in the museums.”
By “solid” he meant plastic. He sometimes worked for years on one painting,
building up pictorial space with painstaking care (see Plate 12). Van Gogh could
finish a painting in half a day. His paintings are passionately expressive but often
structurally weak (see Plate 8). During their Fauvist period, painters such as
Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and Braque were influenced by van Gogh's passionate
use of color. But in time they turned to Cézanne because of his obsession with
pictorial space. His potent influence generated the School of Paris. According to
the criteria of expression and plasticity Van Gogh's paintings have aspects of
greatness but are often incomplete.
What about the mystery in a great work of art? Can the transcendent be
explained away by a geometrical device? No. An artist does not deny the ineffable
when he or she discusses technique. The mystery resides in that part of the artist
which the artist expresses via his or her craft, but it also resides in pictorial space
itself. The problem of pictorial space is overwhelmingly complex and difficult.
Cézanne struggled all his life to reconcile his vision of the motif with a plastic
solution. If the artist resolves the plastic problem then he or she gives birth to a
painting that is itself an individual, alive and mysterious.
Is pictorial space a rigid formula which would narrowly dictate how
painting must be? On the contrary, it is independent of style and content. It
accommodates paleolithic sculpture, Byzantine icons, and cubist and surrealist
paintings under the same umbrella. It requires that the artist deal with each
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